Sunday, May 17, 2009

DADT then and now

AMERICAblog has written a post "the tale of two Gibbs." In it, he shows two clips of white house press secretary Robert Gibbs, both of which are about Don't Ask Don't Tell. The first, from January 2009 is shown here:



The second clip, from May 2009 is shown here:



Notice a difference? As pointed out by AMERICAblog and then concurred with at Box Turtle Bulletin, it may be because "he knows secretly we're on the path to getting screwed." Screwed indeed.

(Day 337)

3 comments:

Joe Moderate said...

I really feel Obama's reluctance to begin addressing DADT is outrageous. I can understand him wanting to move slow on DOMA, but DADT is just ridiculous.

Pisses me off.

Sulum Sententia said...

If you read the wikipedia article you can see that he is saying that congress must repeal it. I am not an expert on this issue but I think that might be true. The article does quote an university which is hardly unbiased as saying that he could all by himself. I mean come on with the wicked witch of the north in charge of congress they should be able to repeal this pretty quickly.

Topher said...

I agree that DOMA will be hard to touch, but DADT doesn't seem beloved by many at all.

Intrepid Wanderer, in a way you're correct that the legislative process will be needed to permanently repeal DADT. So in this, the Obama administration line is correct. However, I have two issues to bring up with that: 1) if that's the case, why did the administration agree to repeal it in the first place? Perhaps it was just to win an election, but then they should have to live up to the disappointment. Perhaps they thought they would pressure the legislature to repeal DADT, but in that case they have not yet called for legislation for the repeal and show no signs of doing so. 2) while they cannot single-handedly make permanent the repeal of DADT, they can stop it for as long as Obama is in office. This has been suggested by many people as a stop-gap measure that Obama does have control over; but instead they're saying "don't think about the good we can do now, instead think of the perfect we could have in the future."